Winter 2025 Editor’s Note: Our Calloused Hands

Greetings beloved readers,

 

As Latines, we have an intricate history with labor. Our homelands were colonized on the premise that Indigenous people were not utilizing their lands properly. Some of our ancestors were brought to the Americas to provide manual labor for the colonizer. Many of our families came to the U.S. to provide essential labor in exchange for a living they couldn’t achieve in their homelands. My own family has a background in picking oranges in Orange County; developing photos for Kodak; gardening in Bel Air; volunteering in the classroom as a few examples. My uncles have told me to take advantage of the opportunity they did not have to go to college. 

However, let us not underestimate the hard work that goes into being a college student. My family has provided decades of manual labor so that I could choose to labor in the classroom, in the La Gente office, in the UCLA Store. Their calloused hands became our brains on the brink of burnout. 

While my family made this trade for my generation, many others have not, and we live off of that labor too. This country runs on invisible labor, and it is La Gente’s job to make seen those left unseen. We do not live the lives we have in this golden country without the often underappreciated work of others. Paid or voluntary, manual or not, we are all the product of someone’s labor. 

While hard work is both ingrained in our culture and stamped on us by outsiders, we must not forget that, above all, we are people. Xenophobes use the logic that immigrants are stealing to justify their own hatred, but they ignore the indispensable contributions immigrants provide this country. The U.S. has often used immigrant labor when needed and then disposed of immigrants when they were no longer wanted. Immigrant or not, documented or not, appreciate the labor that gives you your life and the people behind the labor.

I would like to thank my staff for putting this issue together. While I oversee this publication, it is my staff as a whole that labors to make this possible. Thank you to my writers, copy team, designers, photographers, translators, marketers, radio team and my editors. Thank you to ASUCLA Student Media, the print shop, those who put our issue on the newsstands and many, many thanks to the student fees that funded this print issue. 

Thank you all for reading. I hope you resonate with and learn from these stories.

 

Con cariño,

 

Tommy Correa

Editor-in-Chief

2024-2025